The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States ‹ most of them unregulated and unmonitored ‹ that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

Using carefully culled quotations and selected statistics, Kopel asserts “indisputably false facts” in ProPublica’s reporting.

In fact, it is his column that is indisputably misleading.

Kopel quoted a press spokesperson for New Mexico as saying the state had never compiled “numbers about groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing” — the actual forcing of water into rock. He cites a similar remark from a Colorado official.

These are classic examples of framing a precisely tailored question to elicit a misleading response, much as the tobacco industry used to ask scientists whether smoking could be conclusively identified as a cause of lung cancer.

Here are the facts.

LOOK west from the office towers of the energy companies that dominate Calgary, and the view is spectacular: rolling prairies rise to tree-clad foothills, with the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Rockies on the horizon. Looking down, however, is more unsettling. The city is dotted with motionless construction cranes poised over the pits of abandoned projects. A five-year energy boom here in the administrative heart of Canada’s oil patch and in the tar sands far to the north has ended. The only debate is how painful and persistent the bust will be—not just for the biggest city in Canada’s richest province, Alberta, but for the whole country.

Carbon dioxide emissions from Western Canada's oilsands are set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of the national total by 2020 under current plans. Carbon dioxide emissions from Western Canada's oilsands are set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of the national total by 2020 under current plans.